Dip into the past

Tag / Woodlupine

Some stories are so good, they get retold over and over again. The only problem with some of these stories is that they aren’t true. In this particular case, the story is how the suburb of Queen’s Park got its name. And it involves a murder.

According to Landgate, and repeated by that source-of-all-truth Wikipedia, Queen’s Park was originally called Woodlupine and changed its name after a brutal crime which happened in the suburb in 1911 and became widely known as the Woolupine Murder. After all, who wants to live in a suburb with that association?

We won’t go into the details of the horrific rape-murder here, except to note there are question marks over whether the offender was mentally fit to stand trial, let alone be executed. But executed he was and there’s not a lot we can do about that now.

Now there is some truth to the story, but it doesn’t involve the local residents trying to get rid of a name to which they were very much attached.

Woodlupine wasn’t even originally called that. Until 1898 it was known as Jubilee Estate, until the Railway Department changed the name of the station. The new name was after an old orange plantation in the area which had been called Wood-Lupin. There were some protests, but the station name was changed anyway.

The good citizens of Woodlupine felt that everyone hated them. They were victimised by the Railway Department, by the Post Office and, most of all, by their local government, Queen’s Park, which had been founded in 1907. The new local government rose out of the ashes of the short-lived, and completely disastrous, Canning Roads Board which, you will not be surprised to hear, was loathed by everyone in Woodlupine.

So, when one of the first actions of Queen’s Park was to propose changing the name of Woodlupine Station and the Post Office to Queen’s Park, there was outrage. After all, the new council wanted everything named after itself, and Woodlupine was the busiest Post Office and Station, so it had to go.

Naturally, petitions and complaints followed, and the council chickened out and didn’t follow through on its plan. That is, until the Woodlupine Murder in 1911. Seizing their chance, the following year the councillors wrote to the Railway Department asking for the station’s name to be changed. This was agreed, provided Queen’s Park pay the £10 cost of having all the signage changed.

Perhaps the Woodlupine residents were worn down by years of council ‘oppression’. Perhaps the murder was on their minds. In any case, little opposition seems to have been raised and the council finally got their way.

The real story here (if we put aside the murder victim and her family) is about a local government needing to have its ‘brand’ on a Post Office and Railway Station and opportunistically seizing the moment. Is it more interesting than a tale of residents so disgusted by a crime they wanted to change the name of their suburb? That’s for the reader to decide.